Between MobLand, Venom and whatever brooding Brit he’s playing next, you’d think Tom Hardy’s plate was full. Turns out he’s also been quietly building a rap career, and last week it finally became official: Hardy dropped his debut full-length album, Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer, under his long-running masked alter ego, Frankie Pulitzer.
The 15-track project is a full collaboration with Czarface, the underground hip-hop supergroup made up of Wu-Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck and duo 7L & Esoteric. And this isn’t some vanity side-project with no real credibility behind it; the album pulls in serious guest talent, including Busta Rhymes, Method Man and El-P of Run the Jewels.
Wait, has he been doing this a while?
Longer than you’d think, actually. Hardy first showed up on Czarface’s radar back in 2021 on their Good Guys, Bad Guys EP, always performing under the Frankie Pulitzer name and always fully masked. He’s never publicly confirmed the persona is him, even though it very obviously is. He also joined Method Man on the group’s 2024 track “Knull & Void.”
His rap history actually goes back even further than that: as a teenager, Hardy recorded a mixtape called Falling on Your Arse in 1999 under the name Tommy No. 1, which resurfaced online in 2018. Hardy himself has admitted the early stuff wasn’t great, telling the BBC back in 2011, “Because I come from a nice middle-class neighbourhood, it was a very hard sell. And I wasn’t very good!”
About that Bane voice
For anyone who’s been waiting almost 15 years for it: Hardy brings the Dark Knight Rises growl back on the album, weaving it into his verses alongside a string of other pop-culture and comic-book references. He raps about Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, name-drops Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, and even works in a Titanic reference. For an actor best known for physical, intense performances, it tracks that his rap persona would lean just as heavily into character work as his film roles do.
Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer is out now on Silver Age, alongside a video for the Method Man-assisted track “Mad Technology.” If you’ve ever wondered what it sounds like when Bane starts spitting bars, now’s your chance to find out.
The post Tom Hardy Just Dropped a Full Rap Album, and Yes, He Does the Bane Voice appeared first on Press Pass LA.
